London's Transport Museum

I was inspired to visit this museum by R8’s entry below, and absolutely loved it. Apparently it was given a £22m makeover and re-opened last year. I don’t know what it was like before, but I was pretty impressed with it in its current state.

I half expected it to be a huge collection of old vehicles, like a train museum. But what they have done is look at the history of London based on transport from the 1800s to the present day – so the first area (of 13) looks at the types of transport Londoners used in the early 1800s, which was mainly horses and carriages, or walking. I was fascinated to read that within 1/2 hour’s walk from Westminster or St. Paul’s, you would be in the countryside – how small London must have been then!

The story then continues with the establishment of regional railways that gradually became what is now Transport for London. This comes complete with displays of how the first Tube tunnels were painstakingly dug (at great personal risk), and how Mr Otis designed the lifts and escalators that are so essential to the Tube today. This section really made me appreciate the amazing achievements of engineers – we really take their ingenuity for granted sometimes.

My favourite section was all the vintage Tube posters that show how the railways revolutionised society. There were adverts for days out in London, shopping, the correct etiquette for using the Tube etc – all beautifully preserved.

Kids will love being able to clamber all over vintage Tube carriages and buses (complete with period adverts!), and have a go at the train driving simulator (I was really poor at this and kept on stopping short of the platform, then completely overshot it – much much harder than it looks!). There are also various play areas to keep them amused.

The museum concentrates mainly on the Tube, followed by buses and a nod to black cabs. The final section dealing with the present day is a bit more of a PR exercise, looking ahead to the 2012 Olympics and beyond.

The shop has lots of tasteful gifts, and upstairs there is a good selection of travel posters and toy models of planes and trains.

I’ll definitely be returning here at some point. It was both informative and interesting (not always an easy task!) and really brought to life how the expansion of public transport shaped modern London.

I didn’t actually go into the museum. I just visited the gift shop. If you want a good souvenir from London, there is a board game called The London Game.

In the game you have to make your way to various points of interest in London using the Underground. The gameboard is patterned after the Underground map.

We bought the game several years ago. R9 and I played it almost every day for at least a year after I brought it home. He loved it, and it was a lot of fun. We still play it quite often.

A nice side benefit of him playing the game so frequently is that he has now memorized the map of the Underground system. He’ll be indispensable when I take him with me to London someday.

The last time that I was back in London I stopped in again and bought another game called The Great Game of Britain. The game is pretty much the same concept, only you play it on a map of the Britain and Ireland instead of just on London. Lots of fun.